1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of telephony communications including data network telephony, of which Internet protocol network telephony is a subset, and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for synchronizing multimedia requests during call distribution within a communications center.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the field of telephony communications, call centers have evolved into multimedia communications centers where agents using a variety of real-time media handle service and sales requests. Agents of a communications center are typically equipped with a local area network (LAN)-connected computer having a graphic user interface (GUI) and a telephone handset or headset for conducting voice calls. Agents may also engage customers using instant messaging and other real-time text messaging services, Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), and real-time chat applications.
Various types of customer engagement campaigns may be practiced in a communications center environment. Customers calling into the center may do so through telephone networks such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN), wireless carrier networks, and from the Internet network. Voice calls may be answered by interactive voice response (IVR) attendant and be pre-screened before routing those calls requiring live assistance to an appropriate queue for connecting to live agents.
In a state-of-the-art communications center it is desired that revenue loss caused by customer dropout from queue while waiting for live assistance is kept to a minimum. However, certain types of campaigns require interface by a first agent followed by transfer to a second agent to finish call processing. One example would be that of an outbound contact campaign where live agents are used to qualify connected leads (customers connected by voice) for transaction closers (also live agents). Outbound connections are routed internally as inbound calls, but from a business perspective carry a higher priority than cold inbound calls because of a higher probability that an agent will be able to successfully resolve them.
A problem exists in such a scenario as described above where the first agent must find a second agent to which to transfer the qualified caller to finish a transaction. The caller must be placed on hold in many instances to wait for a second agent to become available and connect. As a result, a certain percentage of these callers drop out of queue while on hold waiting for an agent.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a system and methods for enabling calls in progress with live agents to be transferred or otherwise serviced by second agents without requiring these calls to be placed on hold while second agents are found to finish transactions.